Steve Vai has recorded a full album with Ozzy Osbourne
Guitarist Steve Vai has revealed that he and Ozzy Osbourne recorded enough material to release a full studio album.
The former Frank Zappa guitarist disclosed in a new interview with eonmusic that he is “sitting on a whole Ozzy record”. However, he explained that he can’t release it as he doesn’t have the rights to the music. “We did record some pretty good stuff,” Vai revealed of the collaboration. “The interesting thing about that stuff we recorded from a guitar perspective is all of my rhythm guitar parts, I use an octave divider, and that record doesn’t sound like anything else.”
He continued: “Ozzy had recorded about half of his record for the record company, and Sharon and the label wanted to get him together with some different songwriters to just get some more songs. So I was one of the ones that they wanted to get together with. It was really just to write some songs for Ozzy’s record that he would then take and go use for his record and whoever he was working with on the record would record it.”
The guitarist added that when he was working with Ozzy, the pair “ended up recording a lot of stuff. And then we started scheming”. Despite this, the label intervened and dictated that Osbourne only needed one song from Vai.
Famously, Steve Vai worked on the song ‘My Little Man’, released on Ozzy Osbourne’s 1995 album Ozzmosis, but other pieces were in the running for the album. He recalled: “One of the songs was ‘Danger Zone,’ I had already written it, and it was already done – it was a Gash track – and I thought, ‘Well, maybe he’d like this,’ and I reworked it a bit, but it’s on the shelf.”
Vai concluded: “There was some real, real heavy stuff because, as I mentioned, I used an octave divider on everything, and that’s was a conscious effort. I thought, ‘OK, you’re going to work with Ozzy, and all these incredible guitar players have played with Ozzy; what are you going to do?’ I was not going to be conventional.”
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